Flood victims target Sen. Cruz for climate change views

AUSTIN — A rising tide of U.S. citizens reject what almost all scientists agree on: that human activity is causing climate change.

On Thursday, five Wimberley residents who lost their homes to severe flooding tried to sway public opinion - targeting U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, for his doubts on climate change.

“I’ve always felt a sense of ‘climate change is real,’ I had just never experienced it first hand,” Wimberley resident Scott Price said.

Scott and his wife, Carol Price, are still picking up the pieces following the May flooding that destroyed their home and left at least 28 people dead around Texas.

Organized by the group Environment Texas, survivors of the flood gathered outside of Cruz’s Austin office. They were galvanized by the senator’s comment in May that it was “wrong to try to politicize a natural disaster.”

Throughout his political career, Cruz has been outspoken in denying climate change, and Price said the group hopes to target the presidential candidate because he is in the “position of being able to be a great spokesperson.”

A Pew Research Center poll in 2014 found that 50 percent of adults said the earth is getting warmer because of human activity, 23 percent said it was getting warmer because of natural patterns and 25 percent said there is no solid evidence that the globe is warming.

Public opinion sharply contrasts scientists’ views. A NASA poll found that 97 percent of actively publishing climate scientists agree that climate-arming trends are very likely due to human activities.

But experts say it will take more than a single weather event to change the opinion of those who still suggest climate change does not exist or is not caused by humans.

Sheila Olmstead, an associate professor at UT’s LBJ School of Public Affairs, said the group of flood victims and environmentalists could not point to the Wimberley flood as a result of climate change because it is an individual weather event.

“When you see extreme weather events like in May, you do often hear more conversation about climate change,” she said. “But it’s hard to attribute single event to climate change.”

David Crockett, a political science professor at Trinity University, suggested there are two ways to change public opinion — through a shift from one generation to the next or from a single, huge event.

Crockett said the latest example of a recent tragedy to shift public views was the shooting of nine members at a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina. Since the shooting, there have been calls across the country to remove the Confederate Flag and change the names of buildings named after Confederacy leaders.

“Unfortunately, I don’t know that the lives lost are high enough or the devastation was big enough,” Crockett said of the Wimberley flood.

The Cruz office declined to comment, but a spokeswoman privately met with the flood survivors following the rally.

Nicole Cobler is a reporting intern for the Houston Chronicle’s Austin Bureau. She is a senior at the University of Texas at Austin where she studies journalism. She previously worked as a reporting fellow at the Texas Tribune and as an investigative reporting fellow with News21 at Arizona State University. She also interned for the Austin American-Statesman and the Austin Bureau of the San Antonio Express-News.